How Giving Up Happy Hour Saved My Sanity and My Health

I never was a big drinker until I was. Sure, I had my high school bad-kid phase when I’d crush four beers once a week in the woods. And in college I did my fair share of keg stands at frat parties on the weekends. But as I approached my late 20s, I found myself in a much darker situation. I was polishing off a bottle of wine with friends after work; guzzling two to three Miller High Lifes, oftentimes accompanied with a shot of vodka if it was happy hour (and the price was right); and sucking down extra-dirty martinis—sometimes all in one night and sometimes three to four times a week. All of a sudden, I was a big drinker. It was visible, too. I had gained 10 pounds in roughly three months. Lots of the effects were in my face. My eyelids were swollen as if I were enduring a constant allergic reaction. My cheeks were sagging, making me appear sick or like a flock of bees had just stung me. On top of the alcohol I was consuming, I was eating more thanks to deep diving into my fridge at 11:00 p.m. Two summers ago, I went to the doctor for a yearly checkup, and she noted the weight gain. I asked, “Could it be muscle?” She replied in a thick Russian accent: “Scale doesn’t lie.”

But it wasn’t just my weight that was a problem. Emotionally I was a wreck. I’d wake up once or twice in the middle of the night, leaving me feeling exhausted in the morning. Couple that with a lingering hangover and a lack of motivation—I barely worked out, which in the past had been my one outlet for stress—and the domino effect was no joke. I suffered from mood swings, constant feelings of doubt, and my work began to suffer. I would make careless mistakes or forget simple tasks, like missing a market appointment. Financially? My bank account severely suffered. A martini in New York City will set you back $13 (or more); a beer, especially if it’s craft, can be $7 or $8 (or more); and a glass of wine can range between $9 and $15 easily. Without forcing mental math upon you, I was throwing away close to $100 dollars a week, or $400 dollars a month, or almost as much as my monthly student loan payment. Freaky, right? Even more so: My tendency to over drink went on for roughly two years.

Luckily, it came to a halt last January after one particularly horrific hangover on New Year’s Day—and I mean a crippling headache I couldn’t shake for two days straight. It was then I formed the idea to have only one drink a month. While it was easy physically to keep my drinking habits down, it was difficult socially. At first, when someone asked why I wasn’t drinking, I didn’t know how to respond. I often over explained myself, citing how much I drank the year before or how much weight I had gained—boring stuff to people who just want to party. Eventually, I learned to simply say, “I don’t feel like it,” which seems to suffice. Now, one full year after my resolution, I can honestly say the method works. I can count exactly how many drinks I consumed in 2018 on one hand: a beer with my friend in Boston when my mom had a emergency surgery in January. A glass of wine with a pair of very fun Italian bag designers in February. Half of a martini while on a date in March, and a light cider with a high school friend in May—and that's it. There’s an introspective plus to the tactic, as well. Now, when I reach for a glass or when I think about why I am drinking—Am I stressed? Am I happy? Am I upset?—from there, I make a conscious and very deliberate decision to drink or not to drink. Suddenly, I’m in control of the one thing that, at one point, felt quite uncontrollable.

And sure, in retrospect, I knew all along that alcohol consumption, especially lots of it, is bad. There seems to be a study out every week about the harmful effects of throwing back a cold one. For one, there is the inevitable weight gain, which Dana James, M.S., C.D.N., C.N.S., a triple-certified celebrity nutritionist, compared to eating too much cheesecake. “If you think about it, a glass of wine is about 150 calories. Let’s say you’re drinking three glasses of wine, which is easy for a New York woman to do, that’s 450 calories,” says James. “That is equivalent to a slice of cheesecake. You would never [eat multiple slices of cheesecake] on a weekly basis, but people don’t think like that from an alcohol perspective.” Take that and add sleep disruption, tipsy binge eating, and the fact that alcohol is a downer, before deciding whether or not alcohol is a habit worth fighting for.

Perhaps even scarier? Studies have shown that alcohol has potential cancer-causing effects. Noelle LoConte, M.D., an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, likened alcohol to a converted carcinogen. “It’s not a mystery why we get cancers of the head, neck, and esophagus—people basically bathe their body tissue in carcinogen,” she says. Despite doctors’ warnings, drinking is continuously glamorized, even when it happens to be more than what is deemed an “okay” amount. (For some guidance, LoConte says eight drinks a week qualifies as “heavy” while four in one sitting counts as a “binge.”) Take, for instance, the book-turned-television-series Sweetbitter, which is dotted with sexy wine-chugging moments and poetic hangovers. In its sloppiest of moments, Sex and the City makes two—or three—cosmopolitans look fun. Even Beyoncé quips in her new song “Apeshit”: “Sippin’ my favorite alcohol / Got me so lit, I need Tylenol.” An easy, over-the-counter cure for many morning-after symptoms, but fast-forward two years later? The reality of drinking is not so fun and carefree.

Recently, I was out with friends who were enjoying a few glasses of white wine after work. One had just learned that I had essentially cut alcohol out of my life and exclaimed to the waiter that I wasn’t drinking. “You must have had a rough time,” he said to me, and I replied that he wasn’t wrong. But in that split second, I remembered my sleepless nights, my can’t-shake-it weight gain, and my constantly feeling less-than. And at that moment, flat, boring, New York City tap water had never seemed like a better refreshment during happy hour.